A particular instance of a type of being is distinguished not by its unique character—not by what it is at all—but by the fact that it is, its existence. …
Put another way, one might say that existence is part of the very being of an individual. In searching for a way of thinking that can respect the individuality of people, we are thus looking for a mode of thought that can take existence seriously. Love may indeed do this, but only insofar as it cares for the individual because she is Mary, not because of her Mary-like traits and certainly not just because she is human. By contrast, we need an attitude that cares about individual instances of human being or essence, simply because they are such, as we all do when we recognize the dignity of strangers unnamed and unknown to us. We must somehow find a way to respond to the form or type or idea that we call “human being” and yet to care about particular examples of this type.
To accomplish our task requires a degree of metaphysical courage. In particular, it requires that we give up our comfortable categorization of the lived world into the two boxes called “fact” and “value.” Is our reticence about killing due to some empirical fact of life? If not, conventional thought takes it to be founded on a “value judgment” about life. For such a mindset, our proof that new or continued life cannot be valued sufficiently to prevent killing could be evidence only that our reluctance to kill is irrational and arbitrary. Yet we need not think this way. As Karl Mannheim remarked long ago:
[T]he fact that we speak about social and cultural life in terms of values is itself an attitude peculiar to our time. The notion of “value” arose and was diffused from economics. . . . This idea of value was later transferred to the ethical, aesthetic, and religious spheres, which brought about a distortion in the description of the real behavior of the human being in these spheres.
Against such economistic narrowness, this essay affirms that value language may become a trap and prison of the mind and that the moral world has a multitude of curious creatures in it, many of whom are at least as fascinating as those two beasts of burden called “fact” and “value.” Pierre Manent would agree:
It might be argued that this heterogeneity is adequately taken care of through the public acknowledgment of the legitimate plurality of human values. Nothing could be more mistaken. . . . To interpret the world of experience as constituted of admittedly diverse “values” is to reduce it to this common genus and thus to lose sight of that heterogeneity we [wish] to preserve. If God is a value, the public space a value, the moral law within my heart a value, the starry sky above my head a value, . . . what is not? . . . Value language, with the inner dispositions it encourages, makes for dreary uniformity.
Valuing seeks to dominate the material world. The entire stuff of being becomes a mere resource to be manipulated and shaped into what we value. … No wonder, then, that valuing feels bold and arrogant in contrast to the other attitudes we have examined; a world we only value is a world entirely subject to our evaluation and control.
Respect, by contrast, responds. It eschews control. It steps back before the type of thing cared about, and thus necessarily before every individual example of that type. A limit is given to us and to our schemes of domination. We can no longer destroy and rebuild as we wish; we must accept and accommodate being, even the being of individuals. If I respect human life, if I think it inviolable, then rather than making and manipulating it, I acknowledge and defer to it; I let it be. True, I may sometimes (but not necessarily or always) have a kind of attraction to the object of respect, but even here, my feeling goes beyond the achieving and holding stance that accompanies valuing, to include an appreciative awe or delight.
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[P]rimarily because it is a retreat rather than a charge, respect for each human being can be shared without becoming totalizing or collectivizing. We can find solidarity more safely in a common respect than in a common goal.